That's a little too efficient. If you'll recall, in Industrial Craft power units, an EU/t is one unit per tick, or 20 units per second. So in those terms an assault ship uses 7.5 EU/t, which is the equivalent of about 4 macerators.

Of course that's assuming our units are comparable. Are they? I haven't really been paying attention to this part.

So The assault ship as is ( I'm guessing with no weapons or engines? ) will run for just over 2 and a 1/2 months on 1 ZPM before you have to replace it, if you factor in weapons and Engines ( if its not part of the factor of how much power it uses ) the time will go down with how much you use the ship.

With how hard it should be to make a ZPM i think this is fair.

If I'm wrong please correct me ( i havn't read all of whats on the MC forums yet )

- Dragoon

Edit just saw if you change 7.5 to what ever power requirements the ship needs you can use this for all ships and power supplys.

Edit 2 added [code] things.

Last edited by DragoonPreston on Fri Nov 18, 2011 6:27 pm; edited 1 time in total

If a energy unit produces 1,000,000,000 units of power and the ship uses 150 per second (or 150/20 = 7.5 per tick), thats a simple matter of 1,000,000,000 / 150, which is 6666666.666666667.

Once you have how many seconds it will last, you can then convert that to days using (3600*24) = 86400, which is how many seconds are in a day (anyone familiar with linux/unix times should know that off their head anyway). So to find the actual time to live you you simply divide 6666666.666666667 by 86400 to get your days to burn, which in this case is 77.160493827 days, so depending on the months you're playing, it is about 2 1/2 months.

In other words, Dragoon, you are correct with your calculation. The only variation to your posted equation I would make would be:

Code:

D = ( ( P / ( U * 20 ) ) / 60 ^ 2 ) / 24

M = D / 30

Making U the variable for load. As if you have more subsystems/weapons/engines that number should fluctuate accordingly and thus should be a variable, not a fixed value.

D = DaysM = MonthsP = Total Power left in Energy SupplyU = Total Power draw for all systemsT = Number of ticks per second

Because if you make your own power system T will change you what ever you set it as, and sense 60^ 2 will always be 3600 ( unless you mess something up bad ) there's no point in not changing it out.

You can also use this in ship designers ( I'm thinking of something like the nuclear reactor designer for IC2 gives you the numbers for all the stuff ) if you add in energy loss with wires to come up with efficient placement of the parts, if you include energy loss in wire.

- Dragoon

P.S. I didn't even think of changing it to the total of all systems until i read your post lol

It would probably be much more realistic to have an energy room of IC MEFU or whatevers all wired in sequence. One block doesn't seem logical to power an entire ship for so long.

Well, from what I've gathered, the basic principal should be to have a power core as a single unit, but people should be able to put multiple power units in a single ship.

I'm thinking we should reduce the output of a single unit to around 100mil or so, but be able to link them together to give a total output. This would allow switchable reserve power units to be installed, as well as isolating certain subsystems from the main power frame (i.e a hit on the core wont knock out your life support).

At that point we can use the same style of formula, just chomped down to reflect smaller scales, so P would just very and the load U puts on each grid might very.

It can be done 10000 ways, which is best? Who knows, which is why we're having these debates.

ZPM or Zero Point Module is from Stargate. The reason that it makes so much energy is it draws the energy from a artificial dimension stored in the ZPM, the only reason the energy runs out at all is the process creates exotic particles that will destabilize the dimension that we live in if they get out of the ZPM, and the dimension in the ZPM can only store so much of them before it collapses releasing them in ours.

How they make the energy in the first place is never fully explained ( as far as i know ) but 3 of them powered the shield of Atlantis for about ten thousand years ( If you have never seen the show the city was at the bottom of an ocean for that time ). If in the show 3 can power the shield for Ten Thousand years then i think its fair to say they can power a ship for 2 and 1/2 months, and as there the top tier energy supply there not going to be cheap to make, and as I said 2 and 1/2 months is only running the ship with like life support, lights, ect. Not engines, weapons, and the rest of the subsystems. ( As far as i know right now )

And i know I'm making my life support, my shields, and my weapons on different power supplys.

ZPM or Zero Point Module is from Stargate. The reason that it makes so much energy is it draws the energy from a artificial dimension stored in the ZPM, the only reason the energy runs out at all is the process creates exotic particles that will destabilize the dimension that we live in if they get out of the ZPM, and the dimension in the ZPM can only store so much of them before it collapses releasing them in ours.

How they make the energy in the first place is never fully explained ( as far as i know ) but 3 of them powered the shield of Atlantis for about ten thousand years ( If you have never seen the show the city was at the bottom of an ocean for that time ). If in the show 3 can power the shield for Ten Thousand years then i think its fair to say they can power a ship for 2 and 1/2 months, and as there the top tier energy supply there not going to be cheap to make, and as I said 2 and 1/2 months is only running the ship with like life support, lights, ect. Not engines, weapons, and the rest of the subsystems. ( As far as i know right now )

And i know I'm making my life support, my shields, and my weapons on different power supplys.

Well there's the problem. We're trying to use a Sci-Fi movie/series logic for a game.

Ok, step one, drop the ZPM. Replace it with a Energy producting reactor (something that actually exists and we have knowledge of how it works in detail), then work the math and logic into that. I.E we have a single reactor core that can produce 1,000,000,000 units of power in its life, this is finite to its stored energy (a uranium/plutonium/some-ium rod for example), this reactor will produce this amount at varying speeds depending on its load with some form of a cap as energy, like water, has to have space to flow with any real effectiveness.

So we take our 1B output from 1 unit and we tie it into a loop with 4 total units giving us a total life-time output of 4B units of energy. Now each unit is capable of outputting, lets say, 500 units a second (25 units per tick), so this loop would have the capable output of 100 units per second.

Using a practical logic like this is more understandable and seems more plausible to me. I know this is FutureCraft and everyone wants it to be StarWars/StarTrek/StarGate/StarCraft/etc but if we create our own technology using our own logic, it 1) makes us look like we're actually creative, and 2) shuts up the nerd rage when someones ZPM doesn't perform the same way as it does in StarGate.

I'm not trying to knock ideas or anything I just feel that we should do our own thing rather than trying to copy a popular movie/series's ideas about how to do particular tasks.

The ZPM itself is really just a stabilizer and subspace connection for the REAL ZPM, which is a mechanism contained in a subspace pocket several miles in size. The mechanism itself? No one has any #*%&ing idea what it could possibly look like, but the underlying physics are actually real. See, theres a thing called vacuume energy, which means space has a minimum energy content. If you try to take enough energy from a area of space to drop it below that (very small) minimum, it will literally pull energy out of thin nothing.

I'm not kidding you here, it breaks the law of conservation of energy.

Another interesting thing, that exotic particle thing is just a plot device. A real ZPM could provide a incredible amount of power output for the entire lifespam of the universe. Assuming the collection mechanism doesn't decay.

I agree that we should make our own ideas, but I like how a ZPM is like a giant single use battery that comes pre-charged.

I have an idea for the ZPM like Buggy said it is a real thing and can produce inf energy but how much can you pull at one time, to keep things balanced it could have extremely ( for this tier ) low power out put say something like 16 e/u per second max or how ever much it would take to power the lights and life support for a mid size ship with a crew of 10 - 20. So if you want to you can put like 3 or so on a ship but you have to use storage of some kind to be able to use it effectively and the storage would charge slowly? And possibly to keep it from being too OP the max you can have on the largest ships is like 5 or some where around that number and make it cost a ton of diamond like 18 blocks each ( or some really high number)?

If i don't make much sense here I'm posting this when my brain is almost dead ( aka i need to sleep been up sense like 4 am and its like 10 pm here now )

I do like the idea of using some big reactor for the main power plant because it just feels more right to have a behemoth of a power plant powering a massive ship then a few ZPMs, i just like them lol.

- Dragoon

P.S. Feel free to fix spelling and Gamer mistakes if you see them in any of my posts i try to do my best but my Gramars are be fail at times.

Here's an idea.... instead of ZPM, call it a Modular Fusion Core. (MFC) Modular implies that it's portable, portable implies more than one use. More than one use means you can use it to power damn all anything (that it's got a compatible port for... I'm looking at my Mjolnir here) and the fact that you can make it deploy as a power-producing block similar to the IC nuclear reactor (and maybe we should have some sort of requirement for a fusion chamber? I dunno.) will enable you to install multiple MFCs in multiple reactor rooms across a ship, the same way the Navy IRL does with their nuclear reactors. (2 on every carrier except one which has 8... I think it was the first, as well)

Or another way to have them is just use them to hold a pocket dimension that you can build gates or teleporters to get into the area. The ZPM or SPG ( Subspace Pocket Generator )would have to be put into the device to do that so you can't just teleport into it from anywhere. To make it id say you set the size of the area in it then after building the blank one you use however much energy to make the pocket dimension, like 1000 e/us per block up to 100 blocks then 10000 up to 1000 blocks then 100000 up to 10000 blocks and so on. Then after that if you can make power plants that work in it is up for debate but if so id say cap the power output to like 1024 e/u or 512 e/u per second before you risk destabilizing it and either causing a hole is sub space to destroy the ship or causing every thing in it to explode out of it possibly destroying the ship ( depends how big the area in it is, same for the sub space hole )

The idea of just using them like big batteries is interesting too, like a few stages up from lapatron or how ever its spelled.